If you live in Brookville, your daily errands were never actually happening in Brookville. LIU Post, the university that occupies most of the village's developed acreage, says as much on its own website, telling prospective students that "shopping and culture is right around the corner at the Americana Manhasset, the Broadway Mall, Sagamore Hill, and much more." Note what's missing from that sentence: anything in Brookville itself. The village is estates and campus buildings. It was never built around a commercial strip, so the actual rhythm of grocery runs, coffee stops, and dinner reservations has always happened just outside its borders.
That's what makes the last week and a half worth paying attention to. On August 14, Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace opened its newest store at 130 Wheatley Plaza in Greenvale, the shopping center that sits at the junction of Glen Cove Road and Northern Boulevard. For households in Brookville, that intersection has quietly functioned as the nearest thing to a downtown for years. The new store just made it a lot more useful.
What Was Sitting Empty
The space Uncle Giuseppe's now occupies most recently held a Stop & Shop, which closed amid the kind of regional banner reshuffling that has hit a handful of Long Island supermarkets over the past couple of years. A dark anchor space is bad news for any shopping center. Foot traffic from a full-size grocery store is what keeps the smaller tenants around it in business, so a vacancy at that scale tends to ripple outward. Wheatley Plaza had been sitting with that question mark for a while.
The Store That Filled It
The answer turned out to be bigger than the question. At 56,000 square feet, the Greenvale store is the largest location Uncle Giuseppe's has built in its 25-year history, according to the company's own announcement of the opening. It's also the chain's 13th location and one of two openings the company has planned for the New York market this year, with a Levittown store, taking over a former King Kullen on Hempstead Turnpike, expected later in the fourth quarter.
The store opened fully staffed, with roughly 250 employees on day one, part of a company-wide plan to hire close to 1,000 people across its footprint over the next twelve months. CEO Carl DelPrete framed the hiring push simply: "Our team members are the heart and soul of every Uncle Giuseppe's."
Walk the departments and it reads less like a supermarket and more like a small food hall built into a supermarket footprint:
- A scratch bakery, with dough and bread made on site rather than trucked in
- A butcher counter cutting Sterling Silver beef to order
- Live seafood alongside a sushi counter
- A prepared foods bar stocked with more than 130 ready-to-eat dishes
- Pizza and espresso counters positioned near the entrance
That last detail matters more than it sounds. DelPrete has described the layout shift across the chain's newer stores this way: "So when you walk in, you can order a cappuccino and do your shopping with your cappuccino." It's a small design choice, but it changes what a fifteen-minute stop can accomplish. You're not just buying groceries anymore. You're picking up dinner, a loaf of bread for tomorrow, and a coffee for the drive home, all from one register.
The opening itself came with a bit of theater. The ribbon-cutting included a 2,100-pound wheel of cheddar cheese, made in Wisconsin, carved into the shape of an Uncle Giuseppe's storefront complete with columns. More substantively, the company presented a $100,000 donation to Cohen Children's Medical Center as part of the launch, funded by a customer drive and matched by the DelPrete family.
Why This One Lands Differently in Brookville
Grocery openings happen constantly on Long Island. What makes this one worth noting for Brookville specifically is the trade area Uncle Giuseppe's chose to name for itself. The company's own materials describe the Greenvale store as serving "families across Roslyn, Old Westbury, Brookville, Glen Cove, Oyster Bay, and Locust Valley," a list considerably larger than the hamlet the store actually sits in. That's not marketing language stretching for reach. It's an accurate description of how this corner already works. Roslyn has its own restaurant row and a walkable village core. Old Westbury has Wheatley Road's estate neighborhoods and its own food scene clustered along Northern Boulevard. Brookville has neither. Its residents have always driven somewhere else for the basics, and Wheatley Plaza has long been the closest somewhere else.
What changes now is the ceiling on what that stop can deliver. A butcher counter cutting to order, a live seafood case, and a bakery baking bread the same morning it's sold are the kind of departments that used to mean a special trip into a denser town. Now they're sitting at the same intersection where Brookville residents were already stopping for basics anyway.
The Other Half of the Corner
Uncle Giuseppe's isn't arriving at an empty plaza otherwise. Bar Frites, a French bistro run by restaurateurs Gillis and George Poll, has operated at 400 Wheatley Plaza since 2010 and has built a following for steak frites, croque monsieur, and a rotating list of bistro classics like bouillabaisse and coq au vin. The restaurant keeps later hours on weekends, open from 10:30 in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays for brunch and running until 11 at night midweek. Combined with the new market, the plaza now covers both ends of an evening: a grocery stop that can handle a full dinner's worth of prepared food, and a sit-down bistro a few doors down if you'd rather skip the cooking altogether.
What's Still Moving
Uncle Giuseppe's isn't slowing down after Greenvale. The company opened a 40,000-square-foot store in Bohemia in November 2025 and has the Levittown location on deck for later this year, with additional 2027 openings expected to be announced in the coming weeks. The chain also partners with Island Harvest Food Bank, routing food that would otherwise go to waste toward families across Nassau County, a detail that fits the store's broader positioning as a neighborhood fixture rather than a one-off opening.
None of this changes the property lines around Brookville. What it changes is the answer to a question every resident of a village without its own downtown ends up asking eventually: where do I actually go for the things I need today. For a growing share of Brookville households, the answer just got a significantly better butcher counter, a working bakery, and a cappuccino to carry through the aisles.
If you're weighing a move to this part of the North Shore and want a broker who tracks these kinds of shifts as closely as pricing data, the Sun Sha Team has spent years working Brookville, Old Westbury, and the surrounding North Shore market. A conversation costs nothing and starts with the questions that actually matter for your search.
